The definition moves by contrast. Sculpture, they say, doesn바카라t open up space like a landscape painting: it occupies space. In India, it also occupies time. That petite, 10-cm-tall dancing girl of insouciant aspect바카라the archaeologist바카라s delight바카라is 4,500 years old. Between the Harappan artist who captured a kinetic moment on that tiny piece of bronze and those Buddhist architects who thought of carving immense sacred spaces out of sheer Deccan rock, there already spans two-and-a-half millennia. From there to the present, another two! Entire epochs that cast the celestial and the carnivalesque alike in a profusion of three-dimensional art.
Another contrast, then. The relative poverty of the modern age, the thinning out of the sculptural imagination, its withdrawal from centrestage, its surrender of primacy to painting, its very ambivalence about its status and relevance in the contemporary art world: all this is a new affliction. Trace it through time again. One subplot in the story of India바카라s visual culture in the last one-and-a-half centuries is bookended by two well-known dates: 1857 and 1947. It was in the year of rebellion that the country got a milestone institute: Sir J.J. School of Art in Bombay. Nine decades later, as India turned a chapter with the tricolour바카라s official ascension in New Delhi, a few sculptures started vanishing from Rajpath, the former imperial boulevard.
Today, in his home east of the Yamuna, octogenarian artist A. Ramachandran rues how they removed those 바카라beautiful works바카라 from around India Gate. 바카라If we looked at them for their artistic merit, as opposed to being symbols of colonial legacy, we would not have dislocated them,바카라 the painter-sculptor says. That may be a tad utopian, for those pieces of monumental art were indeed embedded in meanings of power. But their relegation to obscurity바카라in Coronation Park on Burari Road바카라speaks of a parallel movement. To him, India still has practically no sculptural representation because 바카라we continue to follow the British concept of designating portraits for people and things that matter바카라.
These words come from an artist who has traversed both worlds바카라painting and sculpture. In one, the tonal life of old India (adivasi Rajasthan, Kerala temple murals) streams in through his modernist filters; in the other, the transfigured language of mass and volume that he firmed up as an alumnus of Santiniketan, where he learned under the iconic Ramkinkar Baij. He knows, therefore, the poorer cousin바카라s status sculpting has received in independent India. Painting has assumed the central place: it is seen as the prototype form of 바카라art바카라 now. This relative valuation corresponds more to their variable visibility and marketability, which the very structure of gallery spaces furthers. All this while contemporary Indian sculptors gave us consistently high-quality works, barring a minor slide or two, as experts affirm.
Indeed, within the field there are signs of robust life and evolution. Recent trends have ushered in a paradigm shift of sorts. It바카라s not just about traditional mediums like metal, wood and stone giving way to materials such as silicone rubber, textile, e-waste, cardboard, even edible stuff. The new materiality is necessarily more fluid, seeping back and forth between old conceptual walls. Computer-generated sensory inputs bring in an element of augmented reality. Installation art is invading gall-ery space once slotted for conventional works. New-age architecture is again getting defined in terms of sculpture, recovering an old kinship, as virtual movement and kinetic art destabilise the solidity at the other end. The concept of dimensionality too has expanded, with even sound becoming part of sculpture.
This phase of experimentation has been on since the 1990s, according to critic Nancy Adajania. 바카라The viewer today does not see the sculptural form secured in a single place, instead they witness the dematerialisation of the sculptural object,바카라 says the Mumbai curator. 바카라These experiments in sculptural language have not only changed prevailing viewership codes, but is allowing artists to confront caste, class, religion and gender, as well as philosophical questions related to the visceral body, mortality and sexuality.바카라
In Bondage by Prodosh K. Dasgupta
But there바카라s no escaping materiality in the basic circumstances. Veteran Bangalore artist S.G. Vasudev laments the everyday practical difficulties sculptors encounter. 바카라To start with, you need a much bigger space and the investment cost is much higher compared to painting. Large sculptures are tough to transport; they involves more risk of breakage or deformity,바카라 he points out. 바카라No wonder, several exhibitions don바카라t accept terracotta sculptures. Small-format sculptures move faster comparatively.바카라
And yet, India has a rich roster of modernist sculptors바카라from D.P. Roy Chowdhury, Dhanraj Bhagat, Sankho Choudhuri, Somenath Hore, Sarbari Roy Choudhury, Amarnath Sehgal, Himmat Shah, G.C. Bhat, M.V. Devan and Mahendra Pandya et al to the later Sheela Gowda, Ravinder Reddy, Jitish Kallat, Jagannath Panda, Ashwini Bhat, Iranna G.R. and Alwar Balasubramaniam among others. Renowned painters like the late K.G. Subramanyan and Satish Gujral, 91, too have experimented with terracotta murals and architecture respectively. New names such as Subodh Gupta and Bharti Kher have of course come to be known more as installation artists than sculptors. Make-to-order is increasingly the norm.
Traditionally, the very public nature of sculpture inverted the visibility quotient바카라it바카라s paintings that occupied the niche space, says Dr Jayanta Sengupta, secretary-curator of Victoria Memorial Hall, Calcutta, generalising from the situation in Bengal. 바카라Sculpture was not treated as inferior to painting. They occupy two distinct spaces,바카라 he says. 바카라Paintings here existed more in the domain of private collections, of royalty or others. Sculptures were more accessible to the common person. Architectural structures too are adorned outwardly by sculptures, not paintings,바카라 adds Sengupta, who바카라s also director, Indian Museum.
The contrast with the present situation is rather stark. 바카라Be it in a thematic or group show, say one out of ten works will be sculpture. Roughly, this is also the sculptor-painter ratio in India,바카라 says Kishore Singh, director, Delhi Art Gallery. This, when an exhibit by 20th-century Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti was recently priced in London at over 100 million pounds (Rs 900 crore). 바카라Well, that is actually our annual turnover (for sculpture sales in India),바카라 Singh adds.
A. Ramachandran sculpture
Some large-scale sculptures outside the country are by Indians, says Bose Krishnamachari, artist and co-founder of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. 바카라For instance, Anish Kapoor바카라s Cloud Gate (2006) in Chicago,바카라 he points out. Citing Cells of Life, the symbolic landforms done by Americal cultural theorist Charles Jencks outside Edinburgh in 2010, Krishnamachari adds: 바카라For that to happen in India, we need industrial-type foundries, a support system and huge space.바카라
A remarkable oddity on the landscape came up in Malampuzha, near Kerala바카라s oldest dam, in 1969, when Kanayi Kunhiraman completed Yakshi: a 30-foot-high, concrete sculpture of a supernatural woman in the nude. Malayali prudishness did play out initially, with some protests, but aesthetes by and large recognised it as an epoch-defining work. 바카라Today, Kerala does have an atmosphere where sculptors can survive, even flourish,바카라 says 80-year-old Kunhiraman, who has since dotted the coast with several such huge works.
There바카라s indeed life in this special ecological zone. The Mangalore-born Sudarshan Shetty, like fellow Mumbaikar and Kochi-Muziris colleague Riyas Komu, gets his casting done in Baroda and then assembles. In Jaipur, Thomas Kovoor runs a big studio where his peers and juniors from across India camp to work in bronze. Delhiite Sumedh Rajendran has caught the eye with his novelty of conception and industrial materials. Recently, Bangalore got a sculpture garden commissioned, holding out the prospect of sponsorship, while a sunken courtyard in a 1930s-vintage Calcutta building now hosts the Experimenter gallery, an alternative space and curatorial endeavour by owner-couple Prateek Raja and Priyanka.
바카라Things are changing. It바카라s much less labour-intensive and time-consuming for the new generation,바카라 says Vasudev, 76. 바카라You get very good tools too.바카라 So one sees a string of cutting-edge works: M.S. Umesh바카라s self-destruct sculpture video Statues Status (2005), Anita Dube바카라s Keywords (2005), a pedagogical performance involving sculpted meat-words, Shetty바카라s collapsible sculpture Paper Moon (1995) and For Here or To Go (2002), Kausik Mukhopadhyay바카라s recent Squeeze Lime in Your Eye, a kinetic sculpture improvised from found and readymade objects.
Still, they don바카라t enter the retail zone quite as easily. Gallerist Prashant Lahoti of Hyderabad blames the 바카라apartment culture바카라, the space constraint at homes. 바카라Our shows at Kalakriti feature roughly one sculpture to every four or five paintings we exhibit.바카라 Scholar Sadanand Menon is sardonic: 바카라Many wealthy homes consider it fashionable to hang a painting of contemporary masters. Likewise, they should place that little statuette in the drawing room바카라just to announce they have arrived in high society.바카라
A work by Sumedh Rajendran
But 바카라trends바카라 create their own momentum. The first decade of this century, as Kerala바카라s Lalithakala Akademi chairman T.A. Sathyapal says ruefully, saw art school teachers prompting students to opt for painting, which was then experiencing a boom. 바카라Even those who wanted to take up sculpting were discouraged,바카라 he says. Art teacher Narendra Raghunath of Bangalore notes the para-dox of monumental sculptures of Shivaji and Sardar Patel coming up at the same time, 바카라almost like a throwback to the 10th-century Gommateshwara statue in Shravanabelagola.바카라
Sarala Banerjee, who runs Chennai바카라s Artworld, faults her metro바카라s commercial complexes for 바카라ignoring바카라 sculptors. 바카라South India is the capital of sculpture, yet there바카라s little support. Maybe the government can push for installing artworks in, say, malls. They could go for the cheapest Mahabalipuram statue바카라even that would be a beginning,바카라 she says. Despite the costs, she sees sales of smaller pieces going well for Tamil sculptors like Velmurugan, Singaravelan and Vijay Velu, besides P.S. Nandan (see box).
Adajania speaks of a basic incongruence between sculpture and the 바카라anaesthetised바카라 gallery space바카라the open air is a more natural habitat for her, with its potential for interaction with the setting and with people. Advaita Gadanayak, artist and head of the National Gallery of Modern Art, cites the more practical fear gallery owners have of big sculptures damaging the interiors. Says curator Uma Nair, who was associated with NGMA바카라s big sculpture exhibition this summer as part of its 63rd founding year: 바카라Sculptures need to be brought to public spaces. Like Arun Pandit바카라s Garuda that stands at Tirupathi airport.바카라
The relative invisibility, functioning almost like a binary caste system within the artworld, isn바카라t all that new. Ramachandran, who has added 13 self-done sculptures to his 1983 masterpiece Yayati, a 60-feet-long mythworld of murals, speaks of post-Ramkinkar sculptors like S.K. Bakre, K.S. Radhakrishnan, Navjot Altaf and Prodosh Dasgupta. 바카라They have all done great, innovative work. But they haven바카라t found the deserving spot in the Indian narrative,바카라 he shrugs.
More than their mere existence, art historian R. Sivakumar바카라s lens alights on the language of sculpture itself. The Visva-Bharati professor speaks of a 바카라dip바카라 after the death in 1980 of Ramkinkar, who kneaded a modernist idiom entirely out of Indian aesthetic soil. 바카라What we saw for two decades thereafter was the referencing of artists from the West, such as Henry Moore,바카라 says Sivakumar. 바카라Yet we also saw Kanayi and later Mrinalini Mukherjee, Radhakrishnan and T.V. Santhosh emerging바카라바카라artists who had an autonomy of spirit beyond the unconscious traces they carried.
By the early 2000s, community art flourished. Adajania cites Navjot Altaf바카라s collaborative work in Bastar where they built elegant wraparound screens around pilla gudis (hand-pumps), a real, usable aesthetic space. Adds Suresh K. Nair, who teaches visual art at BHU: 바카라Today, you have site-specific sculpting. Someone, say, goes to the forest and works on a stray boulder to turn it into a piece of art.바카라
From malls to forests, galleries to village squares, the potential hosts won바카라t be inert spaces: each will impose and derive its own meaning. But this misfit of our times will also speak of our times, of our deranged fears, our heightened sense of territoriality and narrowing space, to some future archaeologist. If we allow it to. As Ramachandran says regretfully, 바카라But then, people want sculptures to have more representational value than artistic.바카라
By Sreevalsan Thiyyadi with inputs from Stuti Agarwal, Minu Ittyipe, G.C. Shekhar, Ajay Sukumaran, Prachi Pinglay-Plumber, Dola Mitra
